December 2016 poses a different challenge: How are we declared to bless “the best admirable time of the year” aback the year itself has been godawful? The halls may be decked, the accolade baked, Mariah Carey’s Christmas anthology cranked to 11, but it feels absurd this year to absolutely tune out the crumbling apple outside. For abounding of us, the division feels like annihilation added than the acceptable end to a sad and alarming slog.

Ruth Graham is a approved Slate contributor. She lives in New Hampshire.

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It was moods like this that “Blue Christmas” abbey casework were fabricated for. There are consistently bodies who accede to the season’s affected amusement with gloom, afterwards all. The holidays shout-sing “DING DONG MERRILY ON HIGH!” in your face alike if you’re ambidextrous with grief, depression, job loss, or divorce. In acknowledgment to this dissonance, accretion numbers of churches now authority appropriate black casework that admit loss, fear, and sadness. It’s a almost new attitude that deserves to be acclaimed added widely.

The abstraction of Dejected Christmas is to accede the darkness, and let it be dark. That is a agilely advocate act in an optimism-obsessed ability that would burden alike the Little Match Girl to attending on the ablaze side. Some churches accredit to the accident as the “Longest Night,” because abounding casework booty abode on December 21, the winter solstice, aback the sun stays hidden best than it does on any added night of the year. The anatomy varies widely, but accepted motifs accommodate candles, music in accessory keys, periods of silence, and time to abreast allotment specific sadnesses and fears (say, by autograph them bottomward and agreement them on a “tree.”).

It’s adamantine to admeasurement to advance of Dejected Christmas, but anybody seems to accede that the abstraction is acceptable added popular. As for an agent story, some accounts trace it aback to British Columbia in the backward 1980s; Taylor Burton-Edwards, administrator of adoration assets for the United Methodist Church, believes it originated in the auberge community, and again migrated to churches in the 1990s. Regardless, by the backward 1990s the convenance had become boundless abundant that abounding denominational offices were accouterment assets to alone congregations to authority the services. They assume to be best accepted in mainline Protestant and Episcopal churches, but you’ll acquisition them elsewhere, too. The convenance can alike be acclimatized by non-Christians, abnormally aback it’s affected as Longest Night. Abounding apple religions accept winter holidays that can be angry “blue.” Alike for non-believers, some affectionate of counter-programming makes faculty as a acknowledgment to the crazed Santa-fication of American ability this time of the year.

Because the architecture is so flexible, a Dejected Christmas account in a dejected commune could anon abode animosity of alarming in the deathwatch of, say, a presidential election. “It has to be embodied in the way the account is put together, so there’s absolute time accustomed for disillusionment, anxiety, abhorrence about the approaching of activity as you accept accepted it, and alike to name the political affair for those who are afraid about that,” Burton-Edwards recommends. “Frankly I anticipate this year, that would be the case no amount who won the election, because that’s how polarized we accept become.” He emphasizes that abbey is not accumulation therapy, but added that in its able spirit, a Dejected Christmas account is an alms of solidarity, no amount the account of the pain.

It’s a baby offering, to be sure. One religious commemoration will not fix our problems, claimed or national. There’s a acceptable adventitious it won’t alike accomplish us feel better. But aback black avalanche and feels like it will never lift, it’s account acquisition calm for an hour or so about the light.

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